Trials of a film student.

Tag Archives: filmmaker

As the title says, my documentary about young mentalist Chris Rawlins is complete and has been screened at my university. The tutors didn’t offer much feedback, so I’m choosing to take that as a good sign. I wanted to upload it straight away but I kept forgetting my memory stick so it will have to wait til I get back to York. I can hopefully get it up on friday, I know Chris is excited to see it. I would love it if people could take a look at it once it’s up. I’m really happy with it, although the post-production experience wasn’t as stress-free as it could have been, but I think I’m coming to realise there’s always going to be a lot of stress in this job, but I think I can just deal with it, it’s so worth it when you get to work on projects that you love.

Now my focus is shifting to my next project, a film I’m directing separate from my university ones. We have a great concept and a good team assembled. It’s probably the film that’s closest to the kind of films I enjoy and always dreamed of making. The basic idea focuses on getting into the head of a video game character and hearing their shock an confusion at being controlled by an outside force. It’s going to be set in a fantasy kind of video game like Fable or Oblivion, so it should be fun for me and my production designer, who is also my housemate. Unfortunately we have no budget for this as it is completely independent, so this should definitely be interesting. It’s in the early stages, the script is being written up and we’re currently looking for actors.

It’s being made for a short film competition and has to have a running time of less than 3 minutes! Not long at all. But we have a nice little complete story with a nice punchline at the end. I’m excited for this ball to start rolling!

I’m just setting out the main structure of my blog, as I’m planning on keeping this up! I really don’t want this to be something I start and then don’t finish.

So you have the main blog here, then you have a little section about me where you can get in touch with me and find out a bit more. Then I have my projects, which is sort of my online CV. It will have my past projects up in full as well as details of what I did on them, and tell you what projects I’m currently working on, which I’ll be talking about in much more detail here. So yeah, take a look at what I did last year. There’s not too much that I’m putting up at this point. I will probably make some posts featuring some of the other projects where I can talk about where it went completely wrong! But the two that are on there are two that I’m proud of. One because it was the first project I completed and liked, and the second because I am just genuinely proud of what we achieved.

As for upcoming projects, that is what I am very excited about! My main focus is the short film that I am directing called The House. We shoot in one months time, which in film terms is nothing! I am feeling very prepared in terms of how I imagine the complete picture of the film, I’ve completed the shot lists and prepared some storyboards, but that doesn’t mean we’re in any place to shoot yet. It has been very difficult as we received our groups for this project at the end of last year, and have had to try and work on this project throughout the summer, with everybody spread out throughout the country… It doesn’t work that well. But we’ve done what we can, and from the sounds of it more than what a lot of other groups have done. But when I return to university tomorrow, we’re going to have to crack on! We need to find actors and make sure the locations we are thinking of are suitable. Then we have the scheduling, which isn’t the most fun but it isn’t until that’s done that I feel like it is really happening. Finding actors is also scary, as up to this point we have acted in each others projects. But this year is going to be a lot more professional (I hope.) I sort of see last year as a tutorial on the basics of everything.

Other thing’s I’m working on:

We have to put forwards ideas for a new documentary. My main idea involves following the life of young illusionist Chris Rawlins. I filmed some work for him during the summer, when he played the York Opera House, and he has agreed to be in the doc if it gets green lit. If they like my idea I’ll have to pitch in front of the whole year.

I was approached on twitter recently by the Hamilton Panthers football club to help make a short film to represent them. I haven’t heard from them in a couple of days, but it pays to be patient. I find this project very exciting as they approached me to do it. It really does show how social networking and branding actually does work, and is definitely one of the driving forces for me to create this blog. I love the idea of just instead of just a boring CV list, I can send them here and hopefully in time this will look more and more professional and involving. I like how people can get straight to the information they need, but read more if they are interested. And hopefully they will see by my commitment to this just how determined I am in everything I do.